SYNOPSIS

This pamphlet - written collaboratively by a group of people of color, women,

and queers - is offered in deep solidarity with anyone committed to ending
oppression and exploitation materially. It is a critique of how privilege theory
and cultural essentialism have incapacitated antiracist, feminist, and queer
organizing in this country by minimizing and misrepresenting the severity and
structural character of the violence faced by marginalized groups.
According to privilege theory, white supremacy is primarily a psychological
attitude which individuals can simply choose to discard instead of a material
infrastructure which reproduces race at key sites across society – from racially
segmented labor markets to the militarization of the border. Even when this
material infrastructure is named, more confrontational tactics which might
involve the risk of arrest are deemed “white” and “privileged,” while the focus
turns back to reforming the behavior and beliefs of individuals. Privilege
politics is ultimately rooted in an idealist theory of power which maintains that
psychological attitudes are the root cause of oppression and exploitation, and that
vague alterations in consciousness will somehow remake oppressive structures.
This dominant form of anti-oppression politics also assumes that demographic
categories are coherent, homogeneous “communities” or “cultures.” This
pamphlet argues that identity categories do not indicate political unity or
agreement. Identity is not solidarity. The violent domination and subordination
we face on the basis of our race, gender, and sexuality do not immediately create a
shared political vision. But the uneven impact of oppression across society creates
the conditions for the diffuse emergence of autonomous groups organizing on the
basis of common experiences, analysis, and tactics. There is a difference between
a politics which places shared cultural identity at the center of its analysis of
oppression, and autonomous organizing against forms of oppression which
impact members of marginalized groups unevenly.
This pamphlet argues that demands for increased cultural sensitivity and
recognition has utterly failed to stop a rising tide of bigotry and violence in an
age of deep austerity. Anti-oppression, civil rights, and decolonization struggles
WHO IS OAKLAND?
repeatedly demonstrate that if resistance is even slightly effective, the people Anti-Oppression Activism, the Politics of Safety, and State Co-optation
who struggle are in danger. The choice is not between danger and safety, but
between the uncertain dangers of revolt and the certainty of continued violence,
deprivation, and death. There is no middle ground.

escalatingidentity.wordpress.com
 It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less our
desire to lose. If we do not resist, actively, when they come to take what
we have won back, then we will surely lose. Do not confuse the tactics
that we used when we shouted ‘peaceful’ with fetishising nonviolence; if
the state had given up immediately we would have been overjoyed, but
as they sought to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that there was no
other option than to fight back. Had we laid down and allowed ourselves
to be arrested, tortured and martyred to ‘make a point,’ we would be no
less bloodied, beaten and dead. Be prepared to defend these things you
have occupied, that you are building, because, after everything else has
been taken from us, these reclaimed spaces are so very precious.” [5]

[1] http://www2.oaklandnet.com/oakca/groups/cityadminis-
trator/documents/pressrelease/oak033073.pdf
[2] http://reynosoreport.ucdavis.edu/reynoso-report.pdf, pages
27- 28.
[3] http://disoccupy.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/for-people-
who-have-considered-occupation-but-found-it-is-not-enuf/]
[4] http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/campus_as-
sault/articles/entry/1945/
[5] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/25/
occupy-movement-tahrir-square-cairo

The other civil rights movement.

time they had walked through those streets and spaces without being
harassed by police; it is not just the ideas that are important, these spac-
es are fundamental to the possibility of a new world. These are public
spaces. Spaces for gathering, leisure, meeting and interacting – these
spaces should be the reason we live in cities. Where the state and the in-
Who Is Oakland:
terests of owners have made them inaccessible, exclusive or dangerous, Anti-Oppression Activism,
it is up to us to make sure that they are safe, inclusive and just. We have
and must continue to open them to anyone that wants to build a better the Politics of Safety, and
world, particularly for the marginalised, the excluded and those groups
who have suffered the worst. State Co-optation
[...]
Those who said that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see
the horrors that police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance Croatoan, May 1st, 2012
and even force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend
their tentative occupations and spaces: by the government’s own ad-
mission, 99 police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police
cars were destroyed and all of the ruling party’s offices around Egypt
CONTENTS
were burned down. Barricades were erected, officers were beaten back
and pelted with rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition I. The Non-Negotiable Necessity of Autonomous Organizing
on us. But at the end of the day on 28 January they retreated, and we
had won our cities. II. Institutional Struggles Over the Meaning of Antiracist Politics
a. On the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC), Again
b. Politicians and Police Who Are “Just Like Us”
c. Capitalism and the Material Reproduction of “Race” and “Gender”
d. The Racialization of Rape and the Erasure of Sexual Violence

III. The Limits of Contemporary Anti-Oppression Theory and Praxis

a. Identity is not Solidarity
b. Protecting Vulnerable Communities of Color and “Our” Women
and Children: The Endangered Species Theory of Minority Popu-
lations and Patriarchal White Conservationism
c. On Nonprofit Certified “White Allies” and Privilege Theory

IV. Occupy Oakland as Example

a. Occupy Oakland, “Outside Agitators,” and “White Occupy”
b. The Erasure of People of Color From Occupy Oakland

V. Conclusion: Recuperating Decolonization and National Liberation

Struggles; or, Revolution is Radically Unsafe

34
 Mohawk people in the Municipality of Oka, Tupac Katari, Chris Hani,
Nelson Mandela (who led the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe),
Emiliano Zapata, Juan “Cheno” Cortina, Jose Rizal, Bhagat Singh, Yuri
Kochiyama, Kuwasi Balagoon, DRUM, Assata Shakur, and countless
others.
Anticolonial struggles were violent, disruptive, and radically unsafe
for individuals who fought and died for self-determination. One cannot
be a pacifist and believe in decolonization. One cannot be horrified at
the burning of an American flag and claim to support decolonization.
And one cannot guarantee the safety of anyone who is committed to the
substantive decolonization of white supremacist institutions. The fact
that decolonial struggle has been reduced to state-sanctioned rituals of
cultural affirmation, and appeals to white radicals to stop putting the
“vulnerable” in harm’s way, reveals the extent to which contemporary
privilege politics has appropriated the radical movements of the past
and remade them in its own image.
We are told that the victims of oppression must lead political strug-
gles against material structures of domination by those who oppose ev-
ery means by which the “victims” could actually overthrow these struc-
tures. We are told that resistance lies in “speaking truth to power” rath-
er than attacking power materially. We are told that it is “privileged” to
attempt to practically interfere with budget cuts, foreclosures, teacher
firings, disappearing schools, hunger, or the loss of healthcare. We are
told by an array of highly trained “white allies” that the very things we
need to do in order to free ourselves from domination cannot be done
by marginalized communities because they’re simply too vulnerable
to state repression. At mass rallies, we’re replayed endless empty calls
for revolution and militancy from a bygone era while in practice being
forced to fetishize our spiritual powerlessness.
In a country where the last eruption of widespread political unrest
was nearly forty years when the police go to war and it is called “force.”
When business as usual is disrupted in any way, even by shouting, it
is labeled “violent.” In this upside down world militant protests across
the globe are characterized as heroic struggles for freedom while in the
US SWAT teams are deployed to clear reproductive rights rallies. As an
October 24th, 2011 letter from “Comrades in Cairo” published in The
Guardian puts it, “In our own occupations of Tahrir, we encountered
people entering the square every day in tears because it was the first

4 33
components of indigenous traditions which justify caste or caste-like
social divisions. No longer requiring the force of occupying armies, for-
mal decolonization in newly “independent” countries from Senegal to
Vietnam has given way to neocolonial austerity, structural adjustment,
and debt imposed by the global north and administered by those who
Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, famously called the native
“national bourgeoisie.”
As Maia Ramnath observes about the actually-existing history of for-
mal decolonization, “In seeking to replicate the techniques of colonial
rule by institutionalizing states rather than abolishing them, the nation-
alist goal diverged from that of substantive decolonization. If the colo-
nial regime’s structures of oppression were not simply to be reopened
for business under new local management, yielding a new generation of
authoritarian dictatorships and cultural chauvinists, a different logic of
anticolonial struggle was imperative.
...[T]he specter of stateness--the pressure to establish your own, or
to resist the aggression of someone else’s...calls forth the enforcement
of internal conformity, elimination of elements who fail or refuse to
conform, and relentless policing of boundaries, including those of he-
reditary membership, for which task the control of female bodies, sexu-
ality, and reproduction is essential.”
The belief that communities of color in the US to represent coherent,
bounded internal colonies or “nations” working for self-determination
has been stretched to the breaking point by class divisions within these
communities. To be clear: we desire radical liberation, from what the-
orists have called the “coloniality of power” and the institutions - the
borders, the nation-form, the churches, the prisons, the police, and the
military - which continue to materially reproduce racial, gender, class,
and sexual hierarchies on a global scale. And yet we believe that the po-
litical content of contemporary decolonial struggles cannot be assumed
in advance.
21st century decolonization in the US would be unrecognizable to
the individuals who have fought for liberation under the banner of an-
ticolonial struggle in the past—a tradition which includes Toussaint
L’Ouverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines, Lucy Parsons, Amilcar Cabral,
Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Robert F. Williams, Lorenzo
Komboa Ervin, the Third World Women’s Alliance, CONAIE, the indig-
enous militants of Bolivia in 1990, the militants of Oaxaca in 2006, the
32
I.
THE NON-NEGOTIABLE NECESSITY OF
AUTONOMOUS ORGANIZING
As a group of people of color, women, queers, and poor people com-
ing together to attack a complex matrix of oppression and exploitation,
we believe in the absolute necessity of autonomous organizing. By “au-
tonomous” we mean the formation of independent groups of people
who face specific forms of exploitation and oppression - including but
not limited to people of color, women, queers, trans* people, gender
nonconforming people, QPOC. We also believe in the political value of
organizing in ways which try to cross racial, gender, and sexual divi-
sions. We are neither spokespersons for Occupy Oakland nor do we
think a single group can possibly speak to the variety of challenges fac-
ing different constituencies.
We hope for the diffuse emergence of widespread autonomous or-
ganizing. We believe that a future beyond capital’s 500 year emergence
through enclosures of common land, and the enslavement, coloniza-
tion, and genocide of non-European populations - and beyond the 7000
or more years of violent patriarchal structuring of society along hierar-
chized and increasingly binary gender lines - will require revolutions
within revolutions. Capitalism’s ecocidal destiny, and its relentless
global production of poverty, misery, abuse, and disposable and enslav-
able populations, will force catastrophic social change within most of
our lifetimes - whether the public actively pursues it or not.
No demographic category of people could possibly share an identical
set of political beliefs, cultural identities, or personal values. Accounts
of racial, gender, and sexual oppression as “intersectional” continue to
treat identity categories as coherent communities with shared values
and ways of knowing the world. No individual or organization can speak
for people of color, women, the world’s colonized populations, workers,
or any demographic category as a whole - although activists of color,
female and queer activists, and labor activists from the Global North
routinely and arrogantly claim this right. These “representatives” and
institutions speak on behalf of social categories which are not, in fact,
communities of shared opinion. This representational politics tends to
eradicate any space for political disagreement between individuals sub-
sumed under the same identity categories.
5
 We are interested in exploring the question of the relationship be-
tween identity-based oppression and capitalism, and conscious of the
fact that the few existing attempts to synthesize these two vastly differ-
V.
ent political discourses leave us with far more questions than answers. CONCLUSION: RECUPERATING DECOLO-
More recent attempts to come to terms with this split between anti- NIZATION AND NATIONAL LIBERATION
oppression and anticapitalist politics, in insurrectionary anarchism for STRUGGLES; OR, REVOLUTION IS RADI-
example, typically rely on simplistic forms of race and gender critique CALLY UNSAFE
which typically begin and end with the police. According to this politi-
cal current, the street is a place where deep and entrenched social dif-
ferences can be momentarily overcome. We think this analysis deeply
underestimates the qualitative differences between specific forms and
sites of oppression and the variety of tactics needed to address these
different situations.
Finally, we completely reject a vulgar “class first” politics which
argues that racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are simply
“secondary to” or “derivative of” economic exploitation. The prevalence
of racism in the US is not a clever conspiracy hatched by a handful of
ruling elites but from the start has been a durable racial contract be-
tween two unequal parties. The US is a white supremacist nation indel-
ibly marked by the legal construction of the “white race” in the 1600s
through the formation of a cross-class alliance between a wealthy plant-
er class and poor white indentured servants. W.E.B. Du Bois called the
legal privileges accorded to poor whites a “psychological wage”: “It must
be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose suicide
helped spark the “Arab Spring.
a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psycho-
logical wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy
because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of
Nearly fifty years after the dramatic upsurge of wars of national
white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The
liberation fought over the terrain of what used to be called the “Third
police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon
World,” there are few political tools for confronting emerging local and
their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawless-
global racisms between nonwhite communities, and the persecution of
ness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small ef-
ethnic minorities in former colonies by native, nonwhite elites. In the
fect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal
US, this has taken the form of increasing antiblack, Islamophobic, and
treatment and the deference shown to them.”
anti-immigrant racism within “communities of color” and increasing
We live in the shadow of this choice and this history. A history which class divisions within nonwhite demographic categories.
is far from over.
National elites in decolonizing countries have frequently appealed
to idealized ethnic traditions and histories in order to cement social
cohesion and hierarchies of domination within dictatorial one-party
states. Appeals to a kind of authoritarian traditionalism often mobilize

6 31
 There is clearly a need to reflect upon how the dynamics of the en-
campments quickly overwhelmed the capacity of participants to pro-
vide services and spaces free from sexual harassment and violence. To
describe the participants of Occupy Oakland as primarily white men is
not simply politically problematic and factually incorrect - it also pre-
vents us from being able to look honestly at the social interactions that
have actually occurred under its auspices.
Some of Occupy Oakland’s
“White Anarchist Outside Agitators”
{
30
II.
INSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLES OVER THE
MEANING OF ANTIRACIST POLITICS
a. On the Non-Profit Industrial
Complex (NPIC), Again
Nonprofits exist to maintain society as we know it. Nonprofits often
provide vital social services in the spaces left by the state’s retreat from
postwar welfare provisions, services which keep women, queers, and
trans people, particularly those who are poor and oWf color, alive. Post-
WWII welfare provisions themselves were provided primarily to white
families - through redlining or the racially exclusive postwar GI Bill for
example. Social justice nonprofits in particular exist to co-opt and quell
anger, preempt racial conflict, and validate a racist, patriarchal state.
These organizations are often funded by business monopolies which
have profited from and campaigned for the privatization of public social
services. This has been argued extensively by many who have experi-
enced the limits of nonprofit work firsthand, most recently by INCITE!
Women of Color Against Violence.
Indeed, the exponential growth of NGOs and nonprofits could be
understood as the 21st century public face of counterinsurgency, ex-
cept this time speaking the language of civil, women’s, and gay rights,
charged with preempting political conflict, and spiritually committed to
promoting one-sided “dialogue” with armed state bureaucracies. Over
the last four decades, a massive nonprofit infrastructure has evolved
in order to prevent, whether through force or persuasion, another out-
break of the urban riots and rebellions which spread through northern
ghettos in the mid to late 1960s. Both liberal and conservative think
tanks and service providers have arisen primarily in response to previ-
ous generations of radical Black, Native American, Asian American, and
Chican@ Third World Liberation movements. In the 21st century, social
justice activism has become a professional career path. Racial justice
nonprofits, and an entire institutionally funded activist infrastructure,
partner with the state to echo the rhetoric of past movements for libera-
tion while implicitly or explicitly condemning their militant tactics.
7
 The material infrastructure promoting these ideas is massive, en-
abling their extensive dissemination and adoption. Largely funded by
philanthropic organizations like the Ford Foundation ($13.7 billion),
Rockefeller Foundation ($3.1 billion), or the Bill & Melinda Gates Foun-
dation ($37.1 billion), the US nonprofit sector has grown exponentially,
often through the direct privatization of the remnants of America’s New
Deal-era social safety net. This funding structure ties liberal organiza-
tions charged with representing and serving communities of color to
businesses interested primarily in tax exemptions and charity, and
completely hostile to radical social transformation despite their rheto-
ric. In 2009 nonprofits accounted for 9% of all wages and salaries paid
in the United States, generated $1.41 trillion in total revenues, and re-
ported $2.56 trillion in total assets. One need only hear the names of
these philanthropic organizations to realize that they are or were some
of the largest business monopolies in the world, whose foundations are
required to donate 5% of their endowment each year, while 95% of the
remaining funds remain invested in financial markets. The public is
asked to thank these organizations for their generosity for solving prob-
lems which they are literally invested in maintaining.
“With increasing frequency,” Filipino prison abolitionist and profes-
sor Dylan Rodriguez argues, “we are party (or participant) to a white
liberal ‘multicultural’/‘people of color’ liberal imagination which vener-
ates and even fetishizes the iconography and rhetoric of contemporary
Black and Third World liberation movements, and then proceeds to in-
corporate these images and vernaculars into the public presentation of
foundation-funded liberal or progressive organizations. …[T]hese orga-
nizations, in order to protect their nonprofit status and marketability to
liberal foundations, actively self-police against members’ deviations from
their essentially reformist agendas, while continuing to appropriate the
language and imagery of historical revolutionaries. Having lived in the
San Francisco Bay Area from 1995-2001, which is in many ways the na-
tional hub of the progressive ‘wing’ of the NPIC, I would name some of
the organizations…here, but the list would be too long. Suffice it to say
that the nonprofit groups often exhibit(ed) a political practice that is, to
appropriate and corrupt a phrase from…Ruth Wilson Gilmore, radical in
form, but liberal in content.”
8 29
b. The Erasure of People of Color
From Occupy Oakland
A recent communique critiquing the Occupy movement states, “The
participation of people of color [in Occupy Oakland] does not change
the fact that this occupation of public space upholds white supremacy....
Some of our own sisters and brothers have silenced our critiques in or-
der to hold on to their positions of power as token people of color in the
movement.” [3] The communique argues that people of color can sud-
denly “uphold” white supremacy because they do not share the political
analysis of the document’s authors. People of color who do not agree
with the politics advanced by this group are labeled white, informants,
members of Cointelpro, or tokens. Often many of us are simply erased.
This is a powerful and deeply manipulative rhetorical tactic which sim-
ply fails to engage substantively with any of the reasons why people of
color did participate in Occupy Oakland and equates critical participa-
tion with support for rape, racism, sexism, homophobia, and gentrifica-
tion. Needless to say, the authors of the above-quoted passage do not
speak for us.
People of color who were not only active but central to Occupy Oak-
land and its various committees are routinely erased from municipal
and activist accounts of the encampment. In subsequent months the
camp has been denounced by social justice activists, many of whom
work directly with the mayor’s office, who have criticized it as a space
irreparably compromised by racial and gender privilege. Racism, patri-
archy, homophobia, and transphobia were all clearly on display at Oc-
cupy Oakland - as they are in every sector of social life in Oakland. None
of these accounts has even begun to examine how the perpetrators and
victims of this violence did not belong to a single racial demographic,
or track the evolving efforts of participants to respond to this violence.
People of color, women and trans* people of color, and white wom-
en and trans* people who participated heavily in Occupy Oakland have
regularly become both white and (cis) male if they hold to a politics
which favors confrontation over consciousness raising. And within
white communities, similar political disagreements are routinely rep-
resented as differences between individuals with “white privilege” and
those who are “white allies.”
der to survive. In other words their job is to contain this economy, largely
through spending half (or over $200 million annually, and $58 million
in lawsuit settlements over the past 10 years) of the city budget on the
police department. When city politicians argue that protests are the work
of “outsiders,” they’re also asserting the city government and the Oakland
Police Department truly represent the city.
We do not believe that a politics rooted in privilege theory and call-
ing for more racial diversity in fundamentally racist and patriarchal in-
stitutions like the Oakland Police Department, can challenge Oakland’s
existing hierarchies of power. This form of representational anti-op-
pression activism is no longer even remotely anticapitalist in its analy-
sis and aims.
By borrowing a charge used against civil rights movement partici-
pants and 60s-era militants of color like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap
Brown, and even Martin Luther King Jr., as “outside agitators,” city res-
idents have been told that the interests of all “authentic Oaklanders” are
the same. The one month Occupy Oakland encampment was blamed by
the Oakland Chamber of Commerce and its city government partners
for everything from deepening city poverty to the failure of business led
development, from the rats which have always infested the city plaza to
the mounting cost of police brutality. An encampment which fed about
a thousand people every day of its month-long existence, and which
witnessed a 19% decrease in area crime in the last week of October,
was scapegoated for the very poverty, corruption, and police violence it
came into existence to engage.
If you believe the city press releases, “authentic Oaklanders” are
truly represented by a police force which murders and imprisons its
poor black and brown residents daily (about 7% of OPD officers actu-
ally live in the city) and a city government which funnels their taxes
into business-friendly redevelopment deals like the $91 million dollar
renovation of the Fox Theater—$58 million over budget—which line the
pockets of well-connected real estate developers like Phil Tagami. In a
complete reversal of 60s-era militant antiracist political movements, we
are told by these politicians and pundits that militant, disruptive, and
confrontational political actions which target this city bureaucracy and
its police forces can only be the work of white, middle class, and other-
wise privileged youths.
28
b. Politicians and Police Who
Are “Just Like Us”
In California some of the most racist policies and “reforms” in recent
history have been advanced by politicians of color. We are not interest-
ed in increasing racial, gender, and sexual diversity within existing hi-
erarchies of power – within government, police forces, or in the board-
rooms of corporate America. When police departments and municipal
governments can boast of their diversity and multicultural credentials,
we know that there needs to be a radical alternative to this politics of
“inclusion.” Oakland is perhaps one of the most glaring examples of
how people of color have not just participated in but in many instances
led - as mayors, police chiefs, and city council members - the assault on
poor and working class black and brown populations. Oakland Mayor
Jean Quan speaks the language of social justice activism and civil rights
but her political career in city government clearly depends upon satisfy-
ing right-wing downtown business interests, corrupt real estate specu-
lators, and a bloated and notoriously brutal police force.
There is no more depressing cautionary tale of the fate of 1960s-era
politics of “changing the state from within” than the career of Oakland
Mayor Quan. Quan fought for the creation of an Ethnic Studies program
at UC Berkeley in 1969, and in 2011 penned a letter to Occupy Oakland
listing an array of state-approved social justice nonprofits in order to
justify mass arrests and a police crackdown on protesters attempting to
establish a community center and free clinic in a long abandoned city
owned property. [1] In response to a season of strikes, anti-police brutal-
ity marches, and repeated port shutdowns in response to police assaults,
the state offered two choices: either the nonprofits or the police.
Mayor Quan and other municipal politicians are part of a state ap-
paratus that is rapidly increasing its reliance upon militarized policing
to control an unruly population, especially poor people of color in urban
areas. Policing is fast becoming the paradigm for government in gen-
eral. A white supremacist decades-long “war on drugs” has culminated
in a 21st century imperial “war on terror.” The equipment and tactics
9
 Real estate mogul and city power broker Phil Tagami
patrolling the Rotunda Building with a shotgun on the
of “urban pacification” are now being turned on American cities and on day of the November 2nd Oakland general strike.
the citizens and non-citizens who are targeted by austerity measures
which have for decades been applied to the Global South.
This is as much the case in the liberal Bay Area as it is anywhere else.
Recently “Urban Shield 2011,” a series of urban military training exer-
cises for Bay Area police forces, was held on the campus of UC Berkeley
in anticipation of raids on the Occupy Oakland encampment and other
local occupied public parks. Israeli Border Police and military police
from Bahrain, fresh from suppressing an Arab Spring uprising in their
own country, took part in these exercises beside Alameda County Sher-
iffs and Oakland Police Department officers.
We see clearly that in an era of deepening budget cuts and Amer-
ica’s global decline, the white liberal consensus about racial inclusion
is quickly becoming economically unaffordable, and in its place we see
increasingly widespread public support for mainstream, openly white
supremacist social movements. Armed paramilitary white nationalist
organizations like the Minutemen patrol the US border, white suprema-
cist media figures spout genocidal fantasies on the radio and television,
and police killings of young black men and women have become so fre-
increasingly clear that the city’s reputation for progressive activism
quent that even the mainstream media has begun to report on it. At the
could not tolerate the massing of Oakland’s homeless, and the extent of
same time, policing is fast becoming the paradigm for government in
urban social damage, made visible in one location.
general.
The ongoing history of Occupy Oakland is a case study in how much
As Jared Sexton and Steve Martinot argue, “Under conventional
antiracist politics has changed since Bobby Seale and Elaine Brown at-
definitions of the government, we seem to be restricted to calling upon
tempted to run for Oakland mayor and city council respectively in 1973
it for protection from its own agents. But what are we doing when we
against a sea of white incumbents. Oakland’s current city government—
demonstrate against police brutality, and find ourselves tacitly calling
including the mayor’s office, city council, and Oakland Police Depart-
upon the government to help us do so? These notions of the state as the
ment—is now staffed and led predominantly by people of color. State-
arbiter of justice and the police as the unaccountable arbiters of lethal
sanctioned representatives who claim to speak for Oakland’s “people of
violence are two sides of the same coin. Narrow understandings of mere
color,” “women,” or “queers” as a whole are part of a system of patron-
racism are proving themselves impoverished because they cannot see
age and power which ensures that anyone who gets a foot up does so on
this fundamental relationship. What is needed is the development of a
the backs of a hundred others.
radical critique of the structure of the coin.
Whatever the rhetoric of these politicians, their job is to make sure the
[The police] prowl, categorising and profiling, often turning those
downtown property owners and homeowners in the hills are insulated
profiles into murderous violence without (serious) fear of being called
from potential crime and rebellion from the flatlands due to increasingly
to account, all the while claiming impunity. What jars the imagination
severe budget cuts to social services, police impunity, and mass incar-
is not the fact of impunity itself, but the realisation that they are simply
ceration. Increasing numbers of Oaklanders rely upon a massive, unac-
people working a job, a job they secured by making an application at
knowledged informal/illegal economy of goods, services, and crime in or-
the personnel office. In events such as the shooting of Amadou Diallo,

10 27
munity groups mimicked the city’s erasure of people of color in their
analysis of Occupy, when they were not negotiating with the mayor’s
office behind closed doors to dismantle the camp “peacefully.”
From the beginning the Occupy Oakland encampment existed in a
tightening vise between two faces of the state: nonprofits and the police.
An array of community organizations immediately began negotiating
with city bureaucracies and pushing for the encampment to adopt non-
violence pledges and move to Snow Park (itself later cleared by OPD
despite total compliance of individuals who settled there). At the same
time, police departments across the Bay Area readying one of the largest
and most expensive paramilitary operations in recent history. It became
Oakland police preventing the reoccupation of a property in the pro-
cess of foreclosure. 90% of Oakland’s foreclosures are concentrated in 3
largely black and brown zip codes, 94621, 94603, 94605.
the true excessiveness is not in the massiveness of the shooting, but in
the fact that these cops were there on the street looking for this event in
the first place, as a matter of routine business. This spectacular evil is
encased in a more inarticulable evil of banality, namely, that the state
assigns certain individuals to (well-paying) jobs as hunters of human
beings, a furtive protocol for which this shooting is simply the effect.”
c. Capitalism and the
Material Reproduction of
“Race” and “Gender”
Establishing community mutual aid and self-defense against the
violence of emergent mainstream racist movements, against the sys-
tematic rape and exploitation of women, and against the systematic
murder and/or economic ostracization of transgender, transsexual,
and gender-nonconforming people; attacking ICE and police-enforced
austerity policies which have historically targeted communities of color,
naming and resisting the rollbacks of reproductive rights and access to
healthcare as the patriarchal, racist attacks that they truly are; these are
some of the major challenges facing all of us who understand that op-
pression is inextricable from global capitalist crisis. We cannot separate
what’s happening in Oakland from a global wave of anti-austerity and
anti-police brutality general strikes, occupations, and riots across the
globe - from Barcelona to Tottenham, from Tahrir to Mali, and from
Bhopal to Johannesburg.
We do not believe that autonomous groups will be able to sustain
themselves without creating non-state based support networks and
without recognizing the mutual implication of white supremacy with
capitalism and patriarchy. Undocumented immigrants confront a vi-
cious, coordinated, and entirely mainstream ICE, police, and civilian as-
sault which is, to be absolutely clear, a nativist anti-Latin@ movement
committed to patrolling the borders of a nation understood as funda-
mentally white. Intensifying anti-immigrant racism is not unrelated to
capitalism, and just a national but an international phenomenon, fueled
by the success of capitalist globalization, by the profits which could be
realized through debt and structural adjustment programs, US agri-
business subsidies, “free trade” agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA,
and through multinational industries inevitably searching for lower
labor costs through the fragmentation of global supply chains. Auster-
11
ity means women, and particularly poor black and brown women, are
being forced by the state and their husbands, boyfriends, and fathers to
make up for the cuts in services and wages through additional domestic
and reproductive labor they have always performed.
As a recent W.A.T.C.H. communique from Baltimore puts it, “We
know that economic crises mean more domestic labor, and more do-
mestic labor means more work for women. Dreams of a ‘mancession’
fade quickly when one realizes male-dominated sectors are simply the
first to feel a crisis – and the first to receive bailout funds. The politics
of crisis adds to the insult of scapegoating the injury of unemployment
and unwaged overwork. And the nightmare of fertility politics, the ugly
justification of welfare and social security ‘reforms.’ ‘Saving America’s
families,’ the culture war rhetoric that clings to heteronormativity, to
patriarchy, in the face of economic meltdown. Crisis translates political-
ly to putting women in their place, while demanding queers and trans
people pass or else. And the worse this crisis gets, the more the crisis
is excused by a fiction of scarcity, the more the family will be used to
promote white supremacy by assaulting women’s autonomy under the
guise of population control. The old Malthusian line: it’s not a crisis,
there’s just not enough – for them.”
Capitalism can neither be reduced to the “predatory practices of Wall
Street banks” nor is it something which “intersects” with race, gender,
and sexual oppression. Capitalism is a system based on a gendered and
racialized division of labor, resources, and suffering. Violence and de-
privation, premature death, and rape, are structural aspects of an eco-
nomic system which requires that some work and some do not, some
receive care and some do not, some survive, and some die. To say that
poor people of color, queers, or immigrants are not interested or not
profoundly impacted by the economy, and instead interested only in
reaffirming their identities within existing hierarchies of power, is to
work within a rigged zero-sum game for the liberation of a particular
oppressed identity at the expense of the others. In the US in particular,
the celebration of cultural diversity, the recognition of cultural differ-
ence, the applauding of women and queers entering the workplace, and
the relative decline of overtly racist or sexist beliefs among younger gen-
erations, has not improved but instead masked a dramatic deterioration
of the material circumstances of racialized populations.
Massive accumulation through dispossession of native lands; racial-
ized enslavement, murder, and incarceration; constant, intimate, and
12
their own racial privilege and certifying their decision to do so. The
absurdity of privilege politics recenters antiracist practice on whites
and white behavior, and assumes that racism (and often by implicit
or explicit association, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia) manifest
primarily as individual privileges which can be “checked,” given up, or
absolved through individual resolutions. Privilege politics is ultimately
completely dependent upon precisely that which it condemns: white
benevolence.
IV.
OCCUPY OAKLAND AS EXAMPLE
a. Occupy Oakland, “Outside Agitators,”
and “White Occupy”
When Mayor Quan and District Attorney Nancy O’Malley claim that
Occupy Oakland is not part of the national Occupy movement, they’re
onto something. From the start, Occupy Oakland immediately rejected
cooperation with city government officials, wildly hypocritical state and
media definitions of “violence,” and a now largely discredited arguments
that the police are part of “the 99%.” After the coordinated raids on Oc-
cupy encampments across the country, the innumerable incidents of po-
lice violence, and slowly emerging details about the involvement of the
Department of Homeland Security and its information “fusion” centers,
the supporters of collaboration with the police have fallen silent.
The press releases of the city government, Oakland Police Depart-
ment, and business associations like the Oakland Chamber of Com-
merce continually repeat that the Occupy Oakland encampment,
feeding nearly a thousand mostly desperately poor people a day, was
composed primarily of non-Oakland resident “white outsiders” intent
on destroying the city. For anyone who spent any length of time at the
encampment, Occupy Oakland was clearly one of the most racially and
ethnically diverse Occupy encampments in the country—composed of
people of color from all walks of life, from local business owners to fired
Oakland school teachers, from college students to the homeless and
seriously mentally ill. Unfortunately, many activists, clergy, and com-
25
 c. On Nonprofit Certified “White Allies”
and Privilege Theory

Communities of color are not a single, homogenous bloc with iden-

tical political opinions. There is no single unified antiracist, feminist,
and queer political program which white liberals can somehow become
“allies” of, despite the fact that some individuals or groups of color
may claim that they are in possession of such a program. This particu-
lar brand of white allyship both flattens political differences between
whites and homogenizes the populations they claim to speak on behalf
of. We believe that this politics remains fundamentally conservative, si-
lencing, and coercive, especially for people of color who reject the analy-
sis and field of action offered by privilege theory.
In one particularly stark example of this problem from a December
4, 2011 Occupy Oakland general assembly, “white allies” from a local
social justice nonprofit called “The Catalyst Project” arrived with an ar-
ray of other groups and individuals to Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza,
order to speak in favor of a proposal to rename Occupy Oakland to “De-
intensive exploitation of women’s unpaid
colonize/Liberate Oakland.” Addressing the audience as though it were Mohawk warrior Brad “Freddy Krueger”
labor, both in the home and as indentured Larocque, a University of Saskatchewan
homogeneously white, each white “ally” who addressed the general as- economics student, confronts a Canadian
domestic work, and always violently strat-
sembly explained that renouncing their own white privilege meant sup- soldier during the Oka crisis, 1990.
ified according to race -- all of these form
porting the renaming proposal. And yet in the public responses to the
the naturalized and invisibilized underbelly
proposal it became clear that a substantial number of people of color in
of capital’s waged exploitation of workers. The cumulative economic
the audience, including the founding members of one of Occupy Oak-
impact of centuries of enslavement, genocide, colonialism, patriarchy,
land’s most active and effective autonomous groups, which is also ma-
and racial segregation is not simply peripheral but integral and funda-
jority people of color, the “Tactical Action Committee,” deeply opposed
mental to the nature of the global capitalist economy.
the measure.
The US economy reproduces racial, gender, and sexual inequality at
What was at stake was a political disagreement, one that was not
every level of American society - in housing, healthcare, food sovereign-
clearly divided along racial lines. However, the failure of the renaming
ty, education, policing, and prison. And also endlessly recreated in these
proposal was subsequently widely misrepresented as a conflict between
very same sites are the categories “man/woman,” “normal/abnormal,”
“white Occupy” and the “Decolonize/Liberate Oakland” group. In our
“able/disabled,” “legitimate/illegitimate,” “citizen/‘illegal,’” and a series
experience such misrepresentations are not accidental or isolated inci-
of stigmatized populations who always interfere with the smooth func-
dents but a repeated feature of a dominant strain of Bay Area anti-op-
tioning of the national economy. The natural, “harmonious” relationship
pression politics which - instead of mobilizing people of color, women,
between citizens, patriots, taxpayers, owners, workers, rich, and poor, are
and queers for independent action – has consistently erased the pres-
disrupted by “illegals,” welfare queens, faggots, freaks, careless promis-
ence of people of color in interracial coalitions.
cuous teens, and so on. The category of “race” is materially recreated and
White supremacy and racist institutions will not be eliminated endlessly renewed through these institutions which organize the lives of
through sympathetic white activists spending several thousand dollars the undocumented, the imprisoned, the residents of aging ghettos which
for nonprofit diversity trainings which can assist them in recognizing increasingly function as open-air prisons.

24 13
 Speaking of capitalism as though it were somehow separable from
racist exploitation, gendered violence, and the gamut of complex op-
pressions facing us in this world, confines antiracist and antipatriarchal
struggle to the sphere of culture, consciousness, and individual privi-
lege. The dominant praxis of contemporary anti-oppression politics re-
linquishes power to political representatives and reinforces stereotypes
of individually “deserving” and “undeserving” victims of racism, sexism,
and homophobia. Without attacking the material infrastructure which
agglomerates power in the hands of some (a process whose end result is
now called “privilege”), the equalization of “privilege” and the abolition
of these identity-based oppressions in class society is a liberal fantasy.
d. The Racialization of Rape and the
Erasure of Sexual Violence
Recent statistics give a snapshot of worsening racial inequality in
the US today: the median wealth of white households is 20 times that of
black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households, the greatest
wealth disparities in 25 years. Over 1 in 4 Native Americans and Native
Alaskans live in poverty, with a nearly 40% poverty rate for reservations.
From 2005 to 2009, Latin@s’ household median wealth fell by 66%,
black household wealth by 53%, but only 16% among white households.
The average black household in 2009 possessed $5,677 in wealth; Latin@
households $6,325; and the average white household had $113,149.
To address these deteriorating material conditions and imagine so-
lutions in terms of privilege is to tacitly support the continual state and
economic reproduction of racial and gender hierarchies, and renew rac-
ist and patriarchal violence in the 21st century.

Over the last year in California, the racist specter of potential rape
has been used to both delegitimize spaces of militant action - in parks,
streets, homes, or college campuses - and to erase the prevalence of sex-
ual violence throughout society. The figure of the black rapist is routinely
invoked to excuse police violence, retroactively justifying the murders of
countless black men like Kenneth Harding. The need to preempt poten-
tial rape has been explicitly used to rationalize the widely publicized pep-
per spraying of UC Davis students on November 18, 2011. We are tempt-
ed to say this incident is more about the need for state bureaucracies to
justify their own existence than it does about epidemic of sexual violence
in America, but the truth is that the reality of rape and sexual violence
along with rape’s deployment as an ideological weapon are fundamental
to the everyday functioning of the economy and the state.
In recent interviews, UC Davis Chancellor Katehi and Vice Chancel-
lor Meyer, respectively, defend the police response to the Occupy UC
Davis encampment by invoking Occupy Oakland and the implicit threat
of sexual violence from the “outside.” Katehi claimed, “We were worried
especially about having very young girls and other students with older
people who come from the outside without any knowledge of their record
... if anything happens to any student while we’re in violation of policy,
it’s a very tough thing to overcome.” Chancellor Meyer was much more
specific about the hypothetical threats in question: “So my fear is a long-
term occupation with a number of tents where we have an undergraduate
student and a non-affiliate and there is an incident. And then I’m report-

14 23
The prisons, police, state, economy, and borders perpetually reproduce
racial inequality by categorizing, profiling, and enforcing demographic
identities and assigning them to positions in a hierarchy of domination
where marginalized groups can only gain power through the exploita-
tion and oppression of others. The budget cuts and healthcare rollbacks
are leaving poor queer and trans people without access to necessary
medical resources like Aids medication or hormones, and other auster-
ity measures have dovetailed with increasingly misogynist anti-repro-
ductive-rights legislature which will surely result in an increasing and
invisible number of deaths among women. As “diversity” has increased
in city and state governments, and in some sectors of the corporate
world, deepening economic stratification has rendered this form of rep-
resentational “equality” almost entirely symbolic.
We have been told that because the “Occupy” movement protests
something called “economic inequality” it is not a movement about or
for people of color, despite the fact that subprime targeting of Blacks
and Latinos within the housing market has led to losses between $164
billion and $213 billion, one of the greatest transfers of wealth out of
these populations in recent history. And despite the fact that job losses
are affecting women of color more than any other group.
We are told that because the “economy” has always targeted poor
people of color, that increasing resistance from a multiracial cohort of
young people and students, and from downwardly mobile members of
the white working and middle class, has nothing to do with people of
color – but that somehow reclaiming and recreating an idealized cultur-
al heritage does. We are told that we are “tokens” or “informants” if we
remain critical of a return to essentialist traditional cultural identities
which are beyond political discussion, and of the conservative politi-
cal project of rebuilding “the many systems of civilization—economics,
government, politics, spirituality, environmental sustainability, nutri-
tion, medicine and understandings of self, identity, gender and sexual-
ity—that existed before colonization.”
We reject race and gender blind economic struggles and analysis,
but we do not reject struggles against what is, under capitalism, natural-
ized as the “economy.” While the majority of Occupy general assemblies
have adopted a neo-populist rhetoric of economic improvement or re-
form, we see the abolition of the system of capital as not peripheral but
fundamental to any material project of ending oppression.
22
ing to a parent that a non-affiliate has done this unthinkable act with your
daughter, and how could we let that happen.” [2]
These statements illuminate how gender and race are typically
linked in public discourse – here, Katehi, a woman in a position of
power attempting to justify an illegal police action, infantilizes women
as permanent victims and posits a tacitly racist specter of the criminal
rapist, coming from the “outside” to the “inside” of the campus commu-
nity. After the hypothetical rape, the rape survivor disappears. The rape
is regrettable; this regret is not articulated in terms of the trauma of
the rape survivor, but through the fact that the incident will have to be
reported to a parent. To say rape is “unthinkable” is only possible from a
position of privilege in which sexual violence is not an everyday reality.
Considering the fact that rape occurs within every class and every
possible racial demographic, usually perpetrated by friends and fam-
ily, it is utterly fantastic to suggest that a large university campus like
UC Davis is a place where rapes do not occur and where rape culture
doesn’t flourish. Rendering rape unthinkable is absolutely essential to
its structural use as a tool of gendered subordination and exploitation,
and also as an ideological tool of white supremacy. The pepper spray in-
cident reveals how the specter of rape appears in state and media narra-
tives when it’s politically useful, and functions as a tool of racialization
and criminalization (two processes which converge on poor black and
brown populations) when in fact rape and sexual violence affects every
sector of society.
The locations which we are told to fear rape and sexual violence
change depending upon what is politically expedient, and it’s crucial
to notice which sites are emphasized and when – rape has occurred in
Occupy encampments across the country, but far, far more rapes have
occurred in American households, and yet media reports do not dis-
courage us from heterosexual marriage and co-habitation. When is rape
ignorable, and when is it unacceptable? Rape occurs frequently in dorm
rooms, in fraternities and sororities, in cars, on dates, amongst persons
of like age, ethnicity, and class. When the exclusion of police from pub-
lic spaces is represented by the media as an invitation to rape, we are
not at the same time informed that police themselves rape, sexually as-
sault, and abuse women, trans people, queers, sex workers and others
with stomach-turning frequency.
15
 While these administrators mobilize the specter of rape to defend the
police response to the Occupy encampment at UC Davis, they take part
in a nationwide campus culture that sanctions sexual violence. A major
study on the topic found that colleges only expel persons found respon-
sible for sexual assault in 10-25 % of all reported cases. These students
were often suspended for a semester or received minor academic penal-
ties. Half of the students interviewed said that student judicial services
found their alleged assailants not responsible for sexual assault. [4]
When sexual violence manifests in public organizing spaces, the
subject is routinely labeled “divisive” or “just personal”. In a disturb-
ing feat of capitulation to the state’s attack, ‘radicals’ will frequently
suspect that allegations of rape and sexual assault are in fact inven-
tions of state forces attempting to infiltrate communities of struggle.
Many radical communities have come to associate a focus on address-
ing and attacking sexual violence with a politics of demobilization or
distraction from the “real issues.” Again, the result is that the reality of
sexual violence, not merely in one month encampments, but in personal
spaces, amongst persons from every racial and ethnic demographic who
know and trust one another, is methodically erased. The silence around
sexual violence sanctions it, just as the spectacular outrage at isolated
incidents of racial violence (e.g. Trayvon Martin) marks the everyday
police murder of black and brown individuals as routine. The reality of
sexual violence is that it is silenced, evaded, and ignored, empowering
primarily cisgendered men at every level of society, and transforming
conversations about sexual violence into further justification for inten-
sified racist segregation, incarceration, and policing.
After marching more
black and brown communities must not defend themselves against
racist attacks or confront the state, including using illegal or “violent”
means, they typically advocate instead the performance of an image of
legitimate victimhood for white middle class consumption. The activi-
ties of marginalized groups are barely recognized unless they perform
the role of peaceful and quaint ethnics who by nature cannot confront
power on their own. Contemporary anti-oppression politics constantly
reproduces stereotypes about the passivity and powerlessness of these
populations, when in fact it is precisely people from these groups – poor
women of color defending their right to land and housing, trans* street
workers fighting back against murder and violence, black, brown, and
Asian American militant struggles against white supremacist attacks
– who have waged the most powerful and successfully militant upris-
ings in American history. We refuse a politics which infantilizes us and
people who look like us, and which continually paints nonwhite and/or
nonmale demographics as helpless, vulnerable, and incapable of fight-
ing for our own liberation.
When activists argue that power “belongs in the hands of the most
oppressed,” it is clear that their primary audience for these appeals can
only be liberal white activists, and that they understand power as some-
thing which is granted or bestowed by the powerful. Appeals to white
benevolence to let people of color “lead political struggles” assumes that
white activists can somehow relinquish their privilege and legitimacy
to oppressed communities and that these communities cannot act and
take power for themselves.
People of color, women, and queers are constantly compared to
children in contemporary privilege discourse. Even children can have
a more savvy and sophisticated analysis than privilege theorists often
assume! “Communities of color” have become in contemporary liberal
anti-oppression discourse akin to endangered species in need of man-
agement by sympathetic whites or “community representatives” as-
signed to contain political conflict at all costs.
And of course it is extremely advantageous to the powers that be for
the oppressed to be infantilized and deterred from potentially “unsafe”
self-defense, resistance, or attack. The absence of active mass resistance
to racist policies and institutions in Oakland and
in the US over the last forty years has meant that

{ than 1000 miles, pro- life conditions have worsened for nearly everyone.
testers with disabili-
ties confront Bolivian
riot police in La Paz,
February 2012.
16 21
 b. Protecting Vulnerable Communities of Color
and “Our” Women and Children: The Endangered Species
Theory of Minority Populations and Patriarchal
White Conservationism

The dominant praxis of contemporary anti-oppression politics oper-

ates primarily at the level of managing appearances, relinquishing power
to political representatives, and reinforcing stereotypes of individually
“deserving” and “undeserving” victims of racism, sexism, and homopho-
bia. A vast nonprofit industrial complex, and a class of professional “com-
munity spokespeople,” has arisen over the last several decades to define
the parameters of acceptable political action and debate. This politics
of safety must continually project an image of powerlessness and keep
communities of color, women, and queers “protected” and confined to
speeches and mass rallies rather than active disruption. For this politics
of cultural affirmation, suffering is legitimate and recognizable only when
it conforms to white middle-class codes of behavior, with each gender in
its proper place, and only if it speaks a language of productivity, patrio-
tism, and self-policing victimhood.
And yet the vast majority of us are not “safe” simply going through
our daily lives in Oakland, or elsewhere. When activists claim that poor

Young Chilean feminist: “Without god, without law,

without husband: free, beautiful, and crazy”

20 17

III.
THE LIMITS OF CONTEMPORARY ANTI-
OPPRESSION THEORY AND PRACTICE
a. Identity is not Solidarity
Privilege theory and cultural essentialism have incapacitated antira-
cist, feminist, and queer organizing in this country by confusing identity
categories with solidarity and reinforcing stereotypes about the political
homogeneity and helplessness of “communities of color.” The category
of “communities of color” is itself a recently invented identity category
which obscures the central role that antiblack racism plays in maintain-
ing an American racial order and conceals emerging forms of nonwhite
interracial conflict. What living in a “post-racial era” really means is
that race is increasingly represented in government, media, and educa-
tion as “culture” while the nation as a whole has returned to levels of
racial inequality, residential and educational segregation, and violence
unseen since the last “post-racial” moment in American history - the
mid-60s legal repeal of the apartheid system of Jim Crow.
Understanding racism as primarily a matter of individual racial priv-
ilege, and the symbolic affirmation of marginalized cultural identities as
the solution to this basic lack of privilege, is the dominant and largely
unquestioned form of anti-oppression politics in the US today. Accord-
ing to this politics, whiteness simply becomes one more “culture,” and
white supremacy a psychological attitude, instead of a structural posi-
tion of dominance reinforced through institutions, civilian and police
violence, access to resources, and the economy.
Demographic categories are not coherent, homogeneous “communi-
ties” or “cultures” which can be represented by individuals. Identity cat-
egories do not indicate political unity or agreement. Identity is not soli-
darity. Gender, sexual, and economic domination within racial identity
categories have typically been described through an additive concept,
intersectionality, which continues to assume that political agreement
is automatically generated through the proliferation of existing demo-
graphic categories. Representing significant political differences as dif-
18
ferences in privilege or culture places politics beyond critique, debate,
and discussion.
For too long individual racial privilege has been taken to be the prob-
lem, and state, corporate, or nonprofit managed racial and ethnic “cul-
tural diversity” within existing hierarchies of power imagined to be the
solution. It is a well-worn activist formula to point out that “representa-
tives” of different identity categories must be placed “front and center” in
struggles against racism, sexism, and homophobia. But this is meaning-
less without also specifying the content of their politics. The US Army is
simultaneously one of the most racially integrated and oppressive insti-
tutions in American society. “Diversity” alone is a meaningless political
ideal which reifies culture, defines agency as inclusion within oppressive
systems, and equates identity categories with political beliefs.
Time and again politicians of color have betrayed the very groups
they claim to represent while being held up as proof that America is in-
deed a “colorblind” or “post-racial” society. Wealthy queers support ini-
tiatives which lock up and murder poor queers, trans* people, and sex
workers. Women in positions of power continue to defend and some-
times initiate the vicious assault on abortion and reproductive rights,
and then offload reproductive labor onto the shoulders of care workers
who are predominantly women of color.
But more pertinent for our argument is the phenomenon of anti-
oppression activists - who do advance a structural analysis of oppres-
sion and yet consistently align themselves with a praxis that reduces
the history of violent and radically unsafe antislavery, anticolonial,
antipatriarchal, antihomophobic, and anticiscentric freedom struggles
to struggles over individual privilege and state recognition of cultural
difference. Even when these activists invoke a history of militant resis-
tance and sacrifice, they consistently fall back upon strategies of peti-
tioning the powerful to renounce their privilege or “allow” marginalized
populations to lead resistance struggles.
For too long there has been no alternative to this politics of privilege
and cultural recognition, and so rejecting this liberal political frame-
work has become synonymous with a refusal to seriously address rac-
ism, sexism, and homophobia in general. Even and especially when
people of color, women, and queers imagine and execute alternatives to
this liberal politics of cultural inclusion, they are persistently attacked
as white, male, and privileged by the cohort that maintains and per-
petuates the dominant praxis.
19